Extending ISA Management

ISA Management is designed to be extensible. One way that you can extend ISA Management is to use Microsoft® Management Console (MMC) extension snap-ins. The topic How to Create a Microsoft Management Console Snap-in provides general information on how to create an MMC snap-in for ISA, and an example MMC snap-in for an ISA application filter.

Any ISA node can be extended with a snap-in.

What Can Extension Snap-ins Extend?

Extension snap-ins can extend the following:

• The name space by adding scope pane child nodes.
• Context menus.
• Toolbars and toolbar buttons.
• Property pages.

For more information please refer to the MMC documentation.

There are several steps you need to take to create an extension snap-in.

To create an extension snap-in

1. Define your schema in the FPCVendorParametersSet object.
2. Write the code for the MMC snap-in.
3. Store/retrieve the data in the FPCVendorParametersSet object retrieved by using the FPCSnapinNode.CurrentObject.VendorParametersSet property.

Each node of an ISA snap-in exposes its specific data to extension snap-ins by using the COM interface: IFPCSnapinNode. The interface contains four properties:

• ParentArray (of type IDispatch)
• CurrentObject (of type IDispatch)
• ComRoot (of type IDispatch)
• ParentPolicy (of type IDispatch)

The IFPCSnapinNode can be retrieved by querying the IDataObject interface of the ISA node that you want to extend. The ParentArray property is an FPCArray object as exposed through the ISA administration COM object model. Note that this property returns an error for the Root node of the ISA snap-in. The CurrentObject property is interface-specific to the node to be extended. See How to Create a Microsoft Management Console Snap-in for more details.

The ISA nodes that support MMC extensions and their GUIDs are listed in the Globally Unique Identifiers topic of the Reference section.